After a spell as a tutor at Wanganui Collegiate School in New Zealand, Prince Edward studied history at Jesus College, Cambridge.

Prince Edward joined the Royal Marines in 1986, but left the next year and joined Andrew Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Theatre Company as a production assistant.

In 1990, Prince Edward and a number of colleagues established their own theatre company, but it collapsed.

In 1993 he set up a television production company, Ardent Productions. Ardent was accused in 2001 of trying to film Prince William at his university, which breached an understanding reached between the Royal Family and the media. The footage was handed over to Buckingham Palace. In 2002, Prince Edward stepped down as director of production and joint managing director of Ardent.

In 1999, Prince Edward married Sophie Rhys-Jones and took the title of the Earl of Wessex and Viscount Severn.

In 2001, Sophie, now the Countess of Wessex, resigned from the PR firm she founded, after making indiscreet comments about senior politicians and members of the Royal Family to an undercover reporter from the News of the World.

Edward and Sophie had a baby daughter, Lady Louise Windsor, born on 8 November 2003.

On 17 December 2007 they had a baby boy, James Alexander Philip Theo Mountbatten-Windsor.